Saint Augustine corrects at a felicitous hour the heretical mistakes of his youth. But everything that was not ridiculous and puerile in the doctrines of Manicheism, everything that was not materialism and sensuality, everything that is conciliable with his noble Christian philosophy—the necessity of separating, with Christ's sword, the good from the vicious; the nonresignation before evil, put forward as an enemy force—keeps burning, as a kind of inner fire, in his unquiet soul. A recent rereading of the Confessions has invited us to meditate on this combative stance.
Liberalism, which should not be conflated with disbelief, is certainly a doctrine of goodness. It trusts in the automatic adjustment of things to produce that harmony we call good. It is a luxurious conception, typical of a social greenhouse . . . and of a relatively happy age. Within its boundaries, it is reasonable to believe that inertia is the road to perfection. This delicious dream could not last. The XIXth century enjoyed it, and it has been called stupid because of its invincible confidence in human decency. Oh, fortunate guilt!
Masaryk said well that democracy, another phase of the same attitude, was not so much a political procedure as it was a philosophy or a representation of the world. Candor animates it; faith in the spontaneous equilibrium of the great social credit, belief in the excellence of amassing quantities, in the success of the majority vote, inspire it.
The thought of our fathers, which was also that of our youth, rested on evolution. From evolution to progress, the transit is as insensible as that from desire to belief, from hope to wait. Here is a linear vision, where everything is process, march, path, accrual. As in the Tower of Babel, one floor raises upon the other, and we imagine ourselves closing in on the skies.
Thus, evolution, democracy, liberalism had replaced the static image of the universe, which starts in classical antiquity, with an image of movement and open perspectives. Yet movement understood as necessary ascension—a species of upward heaviness—is still infected with immobility. Wholly different is the philosophy we now breathe, and that perhaps will inspire the men of tomorrow morning.
The Aristotelic notion sought goodness in a dead point of equilibrium, halfway between two extremes that were considered equally wrong. Loyal to its adoration of the stationary, Aristotelianism enclosed the universe in a circle and supposed that there is good only where the wheel stops. By contrast, the evolutionary notion places goodness in a terminus, in a finish line toward which one aspires, in an incessant and infinite approximation, which calculus expresses through a precise mathematical formula. The integral of this drift is also a stationary figure.
Wholly different is the new notion to which we are brought through, on the one hand, the metaphysical investigations on the bipolarity of the universe and the mind, and, on the other, the combative experiences of our age; total war has ceased to be a mere historical case—it has gained the vastness of an idea.
This dynamic notion situates truth and goodness in fluctuation itself, in conflict, in the clash of opposing electricities, which blow up endlessly between the two poles of being.
We are back, then, to the old mythologies: those that split the action of existence between Shiva and Vishnu, Ormazd and Ahriman, Day and Night, Sun and Moon. The incurable Manicheism of the mind seems an inheritance which the human race received in the cradle from its Olympic tutors: Prometheus and Epimetheus, the one who hopes and the one who remembers, the one who preserves and the one who reforms.
Everything reaches us in thesis and antithesis, which, to follow Hegel, add in a spark of synthesis. But only to discover, beyond the instantaneous pause, a new obstacle, a new bifurcation to resolve. Everything is yes or no, up or down, before or after, on condition that we do not see these frontiers as static fences, but as focal points that exchange influences and reconcile only where they mutually destroy.
And now that we have seen civilizations fall because of their trust in automatic goodness, in automatic legality, in chivalric codes (which the first miscreant can pull apart, not unlike the callous knifer who triumphs over the swordmaster, imprisoned by a thousand rules), we believe, with bitterness, that men and nations will be obligated to live on the alert, on guard, conscious of an evil whose power and virulence are readily confessed and recognized.
At least, it will be so for a long time to come. "What shall we poets do but seek the lakes?"
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